Pre-order
Viennese architect-designer Egon Riss (1901–64) is one of the modern movements’s more enigmatic characters: renowned for the characterful Penguin Donkey and Gull he created for Isokon Furniture, but little-known in Britain for his significant contributions to architecture and industry.
Published by the Isokon Gallery, this richly illustrated book for the first time brings together the complete story of Riss’s life: his acclaimed debut in Red Vienna, his wartime displacement to London, and his monumental works for the post-war Scottish coal industry.
All proceeds support the Isokon Gallery.
160 pages
Soft cover
Expected release: June 2026
Authors
Gary A. Boyd
Gary A. Boyd is Full Professor of Architecture at University College Dublin and Principal Investigator on the ERC Advanced Grant – ACME: the Architecture of Coal in Modern Europe (2025–2030). He held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2018–22) which resulted in Architecture and the face of coal: Mining and modern Britain (Lund Humphries, 2023), winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion (2003). He is the co-editor of the series Modernism is all alright (on type.ie) and currently sits on the Paul Mellon Centre Advisory Council; the Council of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain; serves as a panel member for the European Research Council (ERC); and as a reviewer for La Caixa Foundation Fellowship programme.
Leyla Daybelge
Writer, broadcaster and Trustee of the Isokon Gallery Trust. Leyla is co-author of Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain (Batsford, 2019), Walter Gropius: An illustrated biography (Phaidon, 2022) with Magnus Englund, Through a Bauhaus lens: Edith Tudor-Hart and Isokon, (2023, Isokon Gallery) with Stephanie Pirker. Other publications include Insiders/outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their contribution to British visual culture (Lund Humphries, 2019). Leyla was a news anchor and correspondent for BBC Radio 4, ITN and Sky News. She lectures extensively on modern architecture and design.
Denis Linehan
Denis Linehan is an Associate Professor of Urban and Historical Geography at University College Cork and a Programme Director at UNIC: The European University of Cities in Post-Industrial Transition. He has wide-ranging interests in urbanism and culture, with published work in Architectural Research Quarterly, Architectural & Decorative Studies, Transactions of British Geography, Journal of Historical Geography, Cities, and Society & Space. His curatorial experience includes Lost boys: The territories of youth (2013) at The Glucksman Gallery and contributions to Infra-Éireann at the Venice Architectural Biennale (2015), Memory of place (2022) and L’Aventure du câble transatlantique (ARTE, 2024).